All, I believe that we have a fairly good way to represent run-time parameters through the ParameterHandler class (which we need to do a better job advertising in the tutorial programs, however): http://dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/classParameterHandler.html But what has always bothered me that in 2010 we still have no way to edit these parameters through a graphical user interface.
Well, we still don't, but I think we've just come a step closer to it. I've changed the data structure in which we store all of the information (name, value, default value, documentation, and pattern of a parameter) to something that I happened to find in BOOST. The advantage is that we now have a way to export all of this information in XML, a widely supported format. This should make it relatively simple to write a small program that reads this data back in through one of the widely used XML parsers and provides a graphical way to edit these parameters, complete with tooltips of what a parameter corresponds to and the ability to check whether a parameter satisfies its constraints (e.g. that an integer parameter really has an integral value). So now we just need to write the corresponding tool. Unfortunately, it's been almost a decade since I dealt last with graphical user interfaces. Is there someone out there who would be interested in a pretty self-contained project that with some prior knowledge shouldn't actually take more than a few days? There are a number of programming languages that already provide most of what one needs for such GUIs, for example Java, Python, Perl. If someone wanted to write the program in C++ using Qt, for example, that would also be ok. So: Volunteers speak up! Best Wolfgang ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wolfgang Bangerth email: [email protected] www: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~bangerth/ _______________________________________________ dealii mailing list http://poisson.dealii.org/mailman/listinfo/dealii
